Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) buses uses Out of Band (OOB) signaling to establish communications across a serial interface. The OOB signaling is defined as bursts of transmission followed by idle gaps on transmission lines. Lengths of the bursts and lengths of the idle gaps are defined in the Serial ATA bus specification as exact amounts of time. The exact timing requirements depend on whether a reset signal, an initialization signal, or a wake up signal is being sent.
Conventional transmitters and receivers implement different logic to transmit and detect the OOB signaling resulting in slight variations from the exact timing requirements. Most Serial ATA bus cabling is non-shielded and thus a great amount of noise is often present on the transmission lines. Therefore, the received OOB signals are distorted versions of the transmitted OOB signals that may not be detected as valid OOB signals.